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Borrowed from Sanskritबहुव्रीहि(bahúvrīhi, “much rice”), itself a bahuvrihi from बहु(bahú, “much”) + व्रीहि(vrīhí, “rice”), referring to a person possessing an abundance of rice, that is, a wealthy person.

Considerable discrepancies prevail with regard to the word मूचिीः which the Calcutta edition and all the authorities except the Bombay copy and No. VI. read without the visarga. It has subsequently been inserted in Mr. [Charles] Wilkins' ms., and is clearly required by the sense, as तोजोमूचिीः is a bahuvrihi or compound epithet.

The drift of this paribâshâ, as Patañjali explains it, is to show that Bahuvrîhi compounds (in English comparable to adjective compounds like lightfoot—i.e. one who possesses light feet,—or blueeye-d, &c.) are of two kinds, the one expressing a quality or an attribute which is essential, and the other expressing a quality or an attribute which is not essential, to the subject so predicated by the compound. Thus, as Patañjali illustrates, if you say: 'there march the priests having red turbans on,' the Bahuvrîhilohitoshńísháh 'having red turbans on' implies here an essential quality of the priests, since this quality cannot be disconnected from their appearance as they march.

At the same time, none of the extended adjectival bahuvrihis has its linear counterpart in either poem. This is characteristic of the general situation in Old English. Neither the correspondence between the linear and the reversed bahuvrihis nor the relation between the linear and the extended bahuvrihis is symmetrical, […]

The fourth subcategory of exocentric compounds are the infamous bahuvrihi constructions, such as hunchback, paleface, scatterbrain. [Hans] Marchand defines these as expressions which denote somebody (or something) which can be characterised by the feature expressed by the compound. Thus, bahuvrihi compounds have some kind of an identifying function. Marchand provides the following explanation for the origins of bahuvrihi compounds: they were used very early in Indo-European languages, primarily for namegiving, but most of them functioned only as adjectives.